Around 2 million people with severe mental illnesses are booked into jails in the U.S. each year—accounting for nearly 20% of all male and 30% of all female inmates. The corrections officials who run our nation’s jails and the public health officials who oversee the delivery of behavioral health services in counties and states have a unique challenge in managing this inmate population. Because many of these severely mentally ill individuals continuously cycle through the criminal justice and community behavioral health systems, local governments must develop response strategies that are supported by improved information sharing and quantitative analysis between these distinct systems.

Click here to learn how the Counties of Pima, Arizona, and Adams, Colorado, through the Open Justice Broker Consortium, implemented a data analytics framework that joins jail custody and behavioral health treatment history data, which offer invaluable insights to the jail inmate population.